The best of REM on video

On Wednesday night, the band who made me love music broke up. R.E.M. were a band that transported me – and many other squishy souls – to a world where murky Americana, post-punk guitars and Byrdsy harmonies co-existed, as did some truly glorious songs. Plenty of other incurable romantics/hopeless losers will have been grinding YouTube to a halt in search of their favourite moments of the band on video. Here are seven of mine.

Three years after Michael Stipe and Peter Buck met in a record shop in Athens, Georgia, later joining up with schoolfriends Mike Mills and Bill Berry, R.E.M.'s debut album, Murmur, became a huge critical hit. Here, a youthful David Letterman introduces the US to the band for the very first time. Stipe's obscure early lyrics, and Buck and Mills' sharp guitar moves, are both very much in check.

R.E.M. were to alternative rock in America what the Smiths were in Britain in the 1980s – making music that sounded like nobody else, but also creating their own brand of visual mythology. Fall On Me from 1986's Lifes Rich Pageant (no apostrophes, pedants) was one of their many striking early videos, the strange lyrics superimposed on black-and-white footage of a quarry. Filmed upside-down, naturally.

By their sixth album, Green, had signed with Warner Brothers, their music also gaining a stadium-sized power. So what video did they make for their most mainstream pop song to date? One in which all the dancers appeared topless, Stipe included. (The MTV-censored version included black strips across every set of nipples – Stipe's included.)

R.E.M.'s two secret gigs as "Bingo Hand Job" in London's 275-capacity Borderline – shortly after the release of 1991's hugely successful Out Of Time – were bootleg cassette gold throughout the 1990s. Long after the internet killed off that concept, it now allows us to watch the performances. This is my favourite moment: Stipe's gorgeously shaky soprano doing Syd Barrett's greatest song justice.

After Bill Berry left the band after 1996's New Adventures In Hi-Fi, many thought that R.E.M. should have split up. Many still do. They forget, or neglect, the precious beauty of Up, the album that followed the drummer's departure. Plenty of dangerous and delicate songs came from it, including this gem.

R.E.M.'s last decade didn't produce many classic songs (although I still hold a candle for All The Way To Reno (You're Gonna Be A Star)). Their best noughties video, however, is this: nothing less than the best coming-out video ever made.

I last saw R.E.M. in August 2008, having endured several disappointing gigs in previous years. Wonderfully, they were astonishing that night. They were finally exploring their back catalogue with joy, and that will stay with me, especially their sublime run through Perfect Circle, one of their first album's ballads. At last, it felt they were coming to terms with their past, having one last fanfare on stage before they would leave us later, forever.

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